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Gender and Genocide*
Nicole Rafter and Kristin A. Bell
Northeastern University, Boston
nicolerafter@yahoo.com
© Nicole Rafter and Kristin A. Bell. Permission from the authors is required to reproduce
any portion of this manuscript in any format or medium.
*With thanks for their help to Mary Gibson, Joshua Kaiser, Annie Pohlman and Laura Sjoberg.
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Abstract
All genocides are gendered. They differentially affect men and women, they enact socially
constructed meanings of biological differences, and they constitute gender relations in the postgenocide period. By ignoring the impact of gender on genocide, we erase the significance of
many atrocities. We miscount victims (including the deceased) and make errors in dating the
endings of genocides. We write laws that mis-define genocide. These realizations are relatively
new. In this paper we discuss how they came into being; why the study of gender and genocide
is important to criminology and international law; and, less directly, why the study of genocide is
important to genocide studies.
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All genocides are gendered events. Not only do they affect men and women differently; they
also enact socially constructed meanings of biological differences and contribute to the
constitution of gender relations in the post-genocide period.1 If we do not recognize the impact
of gender on genocide, we cannot grasp the significance of an exterminatory effort. We cannot
understand what it was about the target group that threatened the genocidists. We do not know
how to count victims, including dead victims. We make false assumptions about when the
genocide ended, closing it off too soon; and we may overlook relevant evidence of genocidal
intent. These realizations about the gendered nature of genocide--and its consequences--are
relatively new. This paper traces how they came into being. It shows why the study of gender
and genocide is important to criminology and international law. Less directly, it suggests why
the study of genocide is important to gender studies.
Research on gender and genocide began with the Holocaust, the archetypal example of
this crime. Two additional cases have also profoundly affected this area of inquiry. The
genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda shifted the question of gender beyond Holocaust studies to
genocide studies more broadly. This paper will focus on landmark work in these three cases to
provide a review of the literature on gender and genocide. In particular, it will chronicle three
important strides made in the scholarship on this topic: discovery of sex differences in genocide,
recognition of the necessity to distinguish between sex and gender, and analysis of the role of
gender in international law.
I. The Discovery of Sex Differences in Genocide
Until relatively recently, genocide scholars in most fields made few distinctions among victims
in terms of either sex or gender; instead they took a seemingly universalist approach, speaking of
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genocide victims in general. This approach was heavily influenced by beliefs about the
Holocaust, which was long understood as the paradigmatic genocide and also as an event that
affected men and women very similarly. Jewishness, in this view, was the primary factor that
elicited Nazi brutality, over-riding all other victim characteristics such as sex, gender, and age,
and to study differences among Holocaust victims was to trivialize the event. In 1998, however,
Dalia Ofer and Lenore Weitzman published an edited collection on Women in the Holocaust that
questioned these assumptions. Their book includes chapters probing ways in which women and
men were treated differently by the Nazis and experienced the Holocaust differently. According
to Ofer and Weitzman, by assuming that the experiences of men represent the universal
experience of the Holocaust, scholars actually give us an incomplete picture of the event. The
premise of their volume is that asking questions about differences in the experiences of men and
women can lead to a richer and more finely nuanced understanding of the Holocaust.
There was some pushback against research on sex differences among genocide victims,
especially by Holocaust scholars who felt that making such distinctions was somehow
inappropriate and petty, given the enormity of the Nazis’ crimes. Genocide scholar Lawrence
Langer, for example, objected to research on sex distinctions among Holocaust victims that
argued, or seemed to argue, that female victims suffered more or were tougher than males. “As
for the ability to bear suffering,” he writes, “given the unspeakable sorrow with which all victims
were burdened, it seems to me that nothing could be crueler or more callous than the attempt to
dredge up from this landscape of universal destruction a mythology of comparative endurance
that awards favor to one group of individuals over another” (Langer 1998: 362). Despite such
objections, however, scholars continued to investigate sex differences in the Holocaust and other
genocides as well.
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Two articles in particular broadened the questions asked about the Holocaust to other
cases of genocide. In 1994, the political theorist Roger Smith published “Women and Genocide:
Notes on an Unwritten History,” arguing that “if we are to understand the nature, history, forms of
victimization, and consequences of genocide, we must include the experience of women as
women” (Smith 1994: 316), experience that , in Smith’s view, often differed radically from the
experience of male victims. Traditionally, Smith continued, women were not killed but rather
raped and enslaved. A few years later the sociologist Helen Fein (1999) published “Genocide and
Gender: The Uses of Women and Group Destiny” in which she, too, recognized that traditionally,
genocides left the men dead but the women raped and incorporated as slaves, concubines, or
spouses into the victorious group. But in more recent times,Fein argued (p. 49), that ancient
pattern has begun to shift, with females of the victim group being slain along with the men or,
when raped, being raped for instrumental reasons--“as a tactic serving strategic war aims (as in
Bosnia and Rwanda).”
Smith and Fein were both asking about sex differences among genocide victims. They
used the word “gender,” but their emphasis fell on “women,” meaning humans whose biology
defines them as females. (“Gender,” on the other hand, is often used to refer to the socially
constructed roles, experiences, and expectations that are associated with sex but in fact differ from
group to group, culture to culture, man to man, and woman to woman.2) This emphasis on sex, as
opposed to gender, was typical of research on women during the 1990s, although even then,
distinctions between sex and gender were starting to appear.3
II. The Discovery of Gender Differences in Genocide
Scholars’ increasing ability to distinguish, analytically, between sex and gender coincided with
two genocides, in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, which demonstrated to the entire world the
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enormous impact of gender on genocide. No longer was it possible to pass off mass rape during
war as the result of pent-up sexual urges of the perpetrators. Rather, the rape camps of the Serbs,
and the vast scale of rapes by the Hutu, together with horrific sexual mutilations by both groups,
proved (in the words of Ruth Seifert [1996: 37]) “that in some cases rape was employed as a
means to achieve political-military ends” (also see Copelon 1995). Rape could no longer be
dismissed as a spoil of war; it was clearly being used to destroy a targeted group. Scholars began
calling this “genocidal rape.”4 (We discuss the legal consequences of this recognition of genocidal
rape in the next section.)
Recognition of genocidal rape coincided with another realization: that, as historian Elisa
von Joeden-Forgey (2012a: 92) writes,
there are many crimes of rape that happen during genocidal processes[:] . . . systematic
mass rape, forced maternity, rape as a means of murder, and sexual torture, gang rape,
coerced rapes between family members, sexual mutilation, forced prostitution, sexual
slavery, rape in rape camps, women forced to ‘marry’ génocidaires, and so forth.
This realization set off an explosion of new analyses of the gendered nature of genocide,
including analyses of the specific gender beliefs of the perpetrator and victim groups. Violent
conflicts are social processes that are carried out collectively and therefore must have collective
meaning. Seifert, for example, locates the sexual violence in the former Yugoslavia in the
context of militarization of men’s work and closing off of public roles for women, along with a
new emphasis on women’s role in the “biological regenerat[tion] of the nation” (Seifert, 1996:
41). She states that “although there is a national aspect to it (i.e., Bosnian women are raped by
Serbian men) . . . the fact is also that women are raped by men, which means that the incontestable
reality of tortured female bodies is translated into male power.” She cites Jalusić (1992: 18) in
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saying that the everyday climate of the former Yugoslavia was characterized by "an allencompassing men's world; you can smell it in the air, that sense of fraternity, that heroism. It is
not just uniforms, it is even the spirit that smells of the military,” while at the same time, “where
women used to function as workers and had their place at least in the nonpolitical, semiofficial
sectors of the [Yugoslav] socialist system, they have now tasks more important and more
‘natural’ than policy-making” (Seifert, 1996: 41). The socially-constructed gender roles of both
men and women contributed to severe, public violence against women--and men as well.
Several scholars have also produced excellent studies of gender in the Rwandan genocide.
Adam Jones (2002) looks at the “gender crisis for younger Hutu men” (p. 66), who in the early
1990s were landless and unemployed and thus lacking prospects for a better future or marriage.
Militias and the work of genocide solved these men’s problems, giving them a purpose in life,
power, drinking companions, and a sense of camaraderie. “’You can get free beer,’” one recruiter
said. “’Come with us tomorrow [to kill Tutsi] and then you can join us at the bar’” (Jones, 2002:
69). Jones quotes another Rwanda scholar, Gérard Prunier, who observes that for marginal Hutu
men, “the genocide was the best thing that could ever happen to them. . . . They could steal, they
could kill with minimum justification, they could rape and they could get drunk for free. This was
wonderful’” (Jones, 2002: 68). Jones and Prunier both believe that the Hutu leaders who
engineered the genocide took full advantage of this crisis in masculinity.
Another author, Jean Hatzfeld, through interviews with Hutu men imprisoned for rape and
murder of Tutsi, produced a graphic picture of masculinities in a soccer group that played and
drank together before the genocide, swung their machetes together during the genocide, and went
to prison together thereafter. “We no longer saw a human being when we turned up a Tutsi
[hiding] in the swamps,” a prisoner told Hatzfeld (2003: 47-48). “The hunt was savage, the
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hunters were savage, the prey was savage--savagery took over the mind. Not only had we
become criminals, we had become a ferocious species in a barbarous world.” These young killers
assumed the masculine hunter role of their grandfathers.
Gender, as von Joeden-Forgey writes, may shape genocide from start to finish:
The gender question in genocide goes well beyond the experiences of women and girls,
the perpetration of gender-based crimes (against both men and women), or even the
comparative study of the experiences of men and women. Rather, it involves examining
the network of gendered relationships that go into creating groups . . . and how ideas about
creative power inform annihilative violence.” (von Joeden-Forgey 2012a: 91.)
There is a great need for research in this area--and rich opportunity for it, because each genocide
is likely to be driven by different assumptions about gender (Carpenter 2002).
Rapid advances in gendered analyses of genocide notwithstanding, again there was
pushback. Some came in the form of a new term, “gendercide,” proposed by the Canadian
political scientist Adam Jones (2004), who used it to refer to sexually-discriminatory genocides.
Although Jones speaks of “gender,” he defines it solely in terms of biological sex, and therefore
defines “gendercide” as “gender-selective mass killing”: “the killing of only men” or “the killing
of only women.” His focus, in particular, is on the mass killing of men, especially those of battleage, as he argues this is the most common, but also most neglected, form of gendercide. For
example, Jones describes the gender-selective detention and mass killing of Albanian men in
Kosovo as gendercide. One problem with Jones’s conceptualization is that it conflates sex with
gender (Carpenter, 2002), as he argues that these men were killed because they were men (a
biological, rather than social reason). It is in fact difficult to think of genocides in which men
were selected for mass killing solely because they were biologically men (or women solely
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because they were biologically women). Jones (2004) himself cites a source which describes how
Kosovo Albanian men were all suspected of being terrorists: a social, or gendered, reason for
extermination, rather than a biological one.
Another problem with Jones’s “gendercide” neologism is that he measures the severity of
genocides in terms of immediate deaths, which is not the best gauge. As Catharine MacKinnon
points out, “peoples are also destroyed by certain acts short of killing” (2006b:209). With its
exclusive focus on mass killing, Jones’s measure rules out genocidal rape and its long-term
consequences, which can include eventual death for a group’s women and culture. The big
problem is not that gender scholars have neglected men’s deaths (as Jones argues); it is that we
still know so little about the influence of gender on genocide. While Jones is correct that we do
indeed need more research on male genocide victims, mainly we need to better understand
genocide per se, including how it is affected by gender.5
III. Gender and International Criminal Law
Recognition of gender as a social force led to the realization that law itself is gendered (e.g.,
Smart 1989). Many feminist legal theorists have focused on reform of the laws of rape, a crime
that for centuries had been defined so as to throw suspicion on the victim and protect the
perpetrator--and thus to perpetuate gender inequality. Their analysis led to important
modifications to remove or at least alleviate gender bias in rape laws (Caringella, 2009).
More recently, the crime of rape has again forced a rethinking of gender and criminal
law, this time in the arena of international law against genocide and war crimes. This change
was linked to what Nicola Henry (2011) refers to as the “victim movement in international
justice,” a new phase in international humanitarian law characterized by attention to victims of
atrocity crimes. After the Holocaust, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (1945-
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1946) relied largely on documents rather than victim testimony (Karstedt, 2010). In addition to
the absence of victims from this justice process, discussions of gender (and women) were also
missing. The Charter of the Tribunal made no mention of sexual violence, leaving out
discussions of the reproductive experiments and forced sterilization to which many women were
subjected (Henry, 2011). Nuremberg’s successor, the International Military Tribunal for the Far
East (better known as the Tokyo Tribunal; 1946), did a better job at addressing sexual violence.
It prosecuted the Rape of Nanking as an aggressive act of war that had included approximately
20,000 cases of rape (Yoshida 2006). But the Tokyo Tribunal was still selective in its inclusion
of gender-based crimes, ignoring the sexual slavery of thousands of “comfort women” (Cole,
2010). In the criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, however, survivors of
sexual violence were included in international war crimes trials for the first time.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International
Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) assisted in shifting the view of sexual violence from an
inevitable byproduct of war to a weapon of war. One way in which the ad hoc tribunals
accomplished this was through the redefinition of rape and sexual violence. But these changes
began slowly. Although the ICTY rejected certain gender assumptions in its definition of rape
(i.e. rejecting a force-based definition of the crime and including coercion as a factor), in some
ways, the tribunal defined rape quite traditionally, in terms of body parts and by maintaining the
aspect of consent. According to it, rape is
the sexual penetration, however slight, either of the vagina or anus of the victim by the
penis of the perpetrator, or any other object used by the perpetrator, or of the mouth of
the victim by the penis of the perpetrator, where such penetration is effected by coercion
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or force or threat of force against the victim or a third person. (ICTY, 1998, Prosecutor v.
Furundzija: par. 185.)
The ICTR produced a new definition of rape and sexual violence :
The Chamber defines rape as a physical invasion of a sexual nature, committed on a
person under circumstances which are coercive. Sexual violence, including rape, is not
limited to physical invasion of the human body and may include acts which do not
involve penetration or even physical contact. . . . Threats, intimidation, extortion and
other forms of duress which prey on fear or desperation may constitute coercion. (ICTR
1998: par. 38.)
This definition is remarkable in two ways. First, in a marked departure from traditional
definitions, it does not require penetration or even mention body parts but rather focuses on
“physical invasion of a sexual nature,” thus broadening the definition of rape and sexual violence
to include acts in which, for example, a woman is forced to watch while militiamen gang-rape
her daughter. Second, it says nothing about consent, a term in traditional rape law that assumed
the victim might have wanted to be sexually violated; rather, the ICTR focuses on “coercion”
and the context (i.e. conflict) in which the sexual violence occurred.
Another way in which the ad hoc tribunals made progress in regard to sexual violence is
by ruling that sexual violence may be understood as a means to accomplish other crimes. In
addition to establishing rape as a crime against humanity, several cases of the ICTY pioneered
the approach of using rape to satisfy elements of other crimes: namely, sexual violence as an act
of torture (the Celebici and Furundijza cases) and as a form of enslavement (the Kunarac case)
(Cole, 2010). Moreover, the ICTY also recognized the need to protect victim-witnesses of
sexual violence (Tadic case), acknowledged the traumatic consequences of such experiences
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(e.g. post-traumatic stress disorder) for survivors (Furundijza case), and included cases of sexual
assault against men (ICTY 1997; also see http://www.icty.org/sid/10314 . However, it was not
until the first-ever conviction of genocide by the ICTR, in 1998, that sexual violence was
recognized as an integral part of the destruction of a group.
Jean-Paul Akayesu, a prominent local official in the Rwandan prefecture of Gitamara,
was charged with 13 counts relating to genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
Akayesu pleaded not guilty to the counts of sexual violence and rape, claiming “that he never
heard of them and considers that they never even took place” (ICTR 1998: par. 11). This was
not the smartest position to take in the wake of the Rwandan genocide, which was already
notorious for vicious and widespread rape. Numerous witnesses contradicted Akayesu. The
ICTR concluded (1998, par. 51) that rape and sexual violence are:
one of the worst ways of inflicting harm on the victim as he or she suffers both bodily
and mental harm. . . . (A)cts of rape and sexual violence . . . were committed solely
against Tutsi women, many of whom were subjected to the worst public humiliation,
mutilated, and raped several times, often in public, in the Bureau Communal premises
[where Akayesu worked] or in other public places, and often by more than one assailant.
These rapes resulted in physical and psychological destruction of Tutsi women, their
families and their communities. Sexual violence was an integral part of the process of
destruction . . . of the Tutsi group as a whole.
In sum, the court recognized the role of rape and sexual violence in gender domination. Akayesu
was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity. The Akayesu court was able to break so
radically with traditional definitions of rape and to recognize Tutsi women as the target of
genocidal violence because one of the three judges, Navanethem Pillay, was a feminist who
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understood the role of rape, as well as the traditional law of rape, in maintaining gender
inequalities.6
The UN Genocide Convention (1948) mentions neither sex nor gender, categories not yet
recognized as legally relevant to genocide at the time it was formulated. Rather, it defines
genocide as acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial
or religious group, as such.” The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (2002) holds
more promise for convicting those who in the future may use rape and other forms of sexual
violence as a tool of genocide (also see Pilch 2009, esp. p 172-173).7 Influenced by the
jurisprudence of the ICTY and ICTR ( Lawry, Johnson, and Asher 2013: 247) the ICC includes
as crimes against humanity rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy,
enforced sterilization, and other grave forms of sexual violence (ICC 2002: Article 7). Moreover,
the ICC formally recognizes the distinction between sex and gender, stating that “the term
‘gender’ refers to the two sexes, male and female, within the context of society” (ICC 2002:
Article 7, #3). This holds the door open to prosecution of gender-based crimes against humanity.
In the future, efforts may be made to update the 1948 legal definition of genocide in light of later
understandings of sex and gender, and perhaps even to create “a separate gynocide protocol or
convention” (MacKinnon 2006).
Less momentously but also importantly, in the future we may also see more use of social
science evidence in prosecutions of genocidal sexual violence. As John Hagan and colleagues
show, “Social science evidence, unlike traditional modes of evidence, can demonstrate the roles
of the physical perpetrators of genocide acting together in horizontal relationships, as well as
establish the indirect participation of perpetrators through vertical relationships, linking higherlevel defendants in a change of command of superior responsibility” (Hagan, Brooks, and Haugh
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2013: 278). In fact, social scientists (Hagan and Morse 2013) have recently proposed a new
term--state rape--to denote sexual violence perpetrated by state (or state-linked) actors. The new
term, although it does wash out gender dimensions of genocidal sexual violence, may establish
new grounds for prosecuting states for sexual violence (Hagan and Morse 2013).
IV. Future Work on Gender and Genocide
Our shortlist for further research on gender and genocide includes four recommendations: we
should include gender in all studies of genocide; focus on men and masculinities as well as on
women and their enactments of gender; review the history of genocide in light of gender; and
pay more attention to the intersectionality of gender with other factors such as race.
First, we should start including gender in all studies of genocide. No human event occurs
in a gender-free environment, and recent research indicates that gender plays a central role in
many of these extreme human events (Pohlman forthcoming 2014; von Joeden-Forgey 2012a; cf.
Bock 1998). Research focused on gender may lead to a redefinition of genocide by, for example,
encouraging us to include women among its victim groups, even if they are not killed but rather
raped, enslaved, and absorbed into the victorious group so that nothing of the victim group
remains. Gender research may also lead us to rethink our assumptions about when genocides
begin and end. If they begin with raids to steal girls and women, and end with enslavement of
women and children, then how should we calculate their beginnings and endings? Has the
Rwandan genocide ended, or will it end when the last woman deliberately infected with AIDS
during rape has died? Or when the last child born of Hutu rape dies? Von Joeden-Forgey (2012a:
94) argues that “Definitions that focus too much on massacre--mass bodies, mass graves, distinct
moments of mass murder--erase almost completely the history and experience of women victims
and therefore obstruct deeper and more penetrating understandings of the crime.”8 Genocide
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research that includes gender may also lead us to recalculate our counts of victims. As Helen
Fein pointed out (1999: 44), “acts that do not result in death have not been taken seriously in
estimating the toll of victims by students of genocide.” And by including gender in our analyses,
we will become more sensitive to the gender constitution of post-genocidal societies.
Our second recommendation is to make a concerted effort to focus on men and
masculinities as well as on women and femininities. Masculinities have considerable explanatory
power. Adam Jones (2004, 2008) was certainly right in urging more attention to sex-selective
massacres of boys and men; sexual violence against men also merits close study. As noted
earlier, unemployment plus a lack of future prospects thwarted the masculinities of young Hutu
men in the early 1990s, leading them to welcome membership in militias (Jones, 2002). Later,
when they began to rape and sexually mutilate Tutsi women, Hutu militiamen may have been
propelled by what von Joeden-Forgey (2012b) calls “genocidal masculinity,” an ecstatic and
liberating, albeit transitory, sense of masculinity that she defines as both “revolutionary and antipatriarchal” (p. 82). Genocidal masculinity--or at least homosocial bonding (Jones 2008: 247)-helps explain the intense camaraderie among the Hutu soccer team killers described by Jean
Hatzfeld in the passage cited earlier. In other genocides, masculinities have played other roles.
For example, during the genocide in former Yugoslavia, Serbs raped women in front of their
husbands in order to humiliate and emasculate the men. In some cases, the Serbs literally
emasculated men, as in the infamous case where Duŝko Tadić and others forced a male prisoner
to bite off another detainee’s genitals (ICTY 1997). Very little research has been done on the
types of masculinities deployed in death squads, such as the NKDV executioners who in 1940
killed the 22,000 Poles buried in the Katyn forest. As these few examples indicate, in studying
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genocide we need to better understand the gendered enactments of men as well as women,
perpetrators as well as victims, and these will vary from group to group.
Third, we need to reexamine histories of genocide in light of gender. Roger Smith (1994)
and Helen Fein (1999) both assumed that historically, genocide had followed the pattern of killthe-men-and-rape-and-assimilate-the-women-and-children, although both also noted that the
pattern seemed to be changing. It may indeed be true that historically, genocides followed that
pattern, but we won’t really know until we reassess genocides of the past in light of gender. We
wonder if genocidal rape really is a recent innovation, as some of the recent literature seems to
assume. The Ottoman pogroms that preceded the Armenian genocide evidently involved
something very like genocidal rape, as did the rapes during the Armenian genocide itself, when
Ottomans and Kurds attacked along the “deportation” routes. If we do enough historical
research, we may find more continuity than change in genocides through history, at least in terms
of rape. Moreover, we may gain access to the gendered fears, compromises (e.g., Hájková
2013), and torments of genocide victims.
Fourth, we would like to see more study of the intersections of gender with other social
factors during genocide (Carpenter, 2002). Feminist standpoint theory recognizes that there is not
a universal experience of all women. Standpoint scholars recognize that women hail from a
diverse range of class, cultural, and racial backgrounds, inhabit many different social realities,
and endure oppression and exploitation in many different ways (Brooks, 2007). In the study of
genocide, the most influential of these other factors may well turn out to be race/ethnicity, and
we already have a good model for such research in Hagan and Rymond-Richmond’s (2009)
study of Darfur, in which Arab Janjaweed militias, in “wraparound sunglasses [and] display[ing]
weapons,” (p. 206), attacked African villages, shouting racial epithets as they raped and killed.
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In Rwanda, erotic fantasies about Tutsi women fueled Hutu men’s sexual violence (Nowrojee
1996). An example of the intersection of gender with age can be found in the slaughter at
Srebrenica, where not only adult men but also boys were massacred because the latter might
grow up to avenge the violence. (Similar logic has led to the killing of young males of the
targeted racial or ethnic group in many genocides.) Gender again intersected with age in the
Armenian genocide, in which girls considered most beautiful were selected for sexual
depredation (Bell, forthcoming).9 Gender intersected with socio-economic status in the case of
the prostitutes whom the Nazis sent to concentration camps; some of these women were revictimized when they were assigned to brothels servicing the prisoners. Gendered
intersectionalities appear to be an exceptionally fertile area of genocide research.
_________________
To conclude: In the years ahead, examining genocide from the perspective of gender is likely to
transform genocide studies and even genocide prosecutions. It will force a redefinition of
genocide and perhaps a formal revision of the UN’s Convention on Genocide to recognize a fifth
category--gender--in addition to the four groups already protected by the UN (those defined by
nationality, ethnicity, race, and religion). It will also force us to find new ways to count
genocide’s victims, one that goes beyond what Kaiser and Hagan (forthcoming: 3) call “the
hegemonic focus on killing” to include both victims who outlive the immediate violence and
those who are harmed by gender-based atrocities. We will have to rethink how we date the
termination of genocide. Perhaps we will learn why men are the chief perpetrators, how
perpetrators pick their victims, and how their tools of destruction are gendered. We may have to
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rewrite the history of genocide. The list could go on, but I think it is clear that gender analyses
have the power to radically revamp the study and prosecution of genocide.
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Notes:
1
For the last point here, we are indebted to Laura Sjoberg.
2
While there are other ways of defining the difference between biological sex and gender, we are
using the definition that appears most frequently in the literature on genocide and gender.
Moreover, the International Criminal Court has adopted this definition (Article 7, #3).
3
In fact, both articles make a start toward distinguishing between sex (“woman”) and gender,
Smith (1994) on p. 323 and Fein (1999) on p. 59. Ofer and Weitzmann (1998) were among the
first to distinguish between sex and gender, and their collection remains a model for its
willingness to include discussions of various dimensions of the issue. For another conceptual
trailblazer, see Copelon 1995.
4
According to Jones (2008: 232), “Catharine MacKinnon seems first to have deployed the
concept of ‘rape [as] a genocidal act,” in her 1994 essay “Rape, Genocide, and Women’s Human
Rights,” Harvard Women’s Law Journal 5: 9-12.
5
In a 2002 article, Adam Jones bitterly laments research on gender and genocide that focuses on
female victims, and he charges feminist scholars with something close to malfeasance: “[S]uch
commentary as exists on gender and genocide has tended to actively suppress the male
experience, with the aim, in most cases, of increasing the sympathy and policy attention extended
to female victims. Such an approach should be seen as a betrayal of the spirit of human rights
work” (Jones, 2002: 87; emphasis in original). Here, too, Jones does not recognize women as
23
genocide victims unless they are killed: “If males tend to be disproportionately targeted in
genocide, then women tend to be disproportionately the survivors ” (2002: 88). This refusal is
especially strange as Jones is here writing about the Rwandan genocide, whose rape victims can
hardly be described as “survivors”: many of them died of wounds; others, deliberately infected
with AIDS, have also died; and those who remain alive suffer ostracism as well as, in many cases,
the pains of raising children born of rape (Nowrojee, 1996).
To be fair, however, we should note that Jones seems to have relinquished his insistence
on the concept of “gendercide.” In his 2008 overview of the historiography on gender and
genocide, he recognizes problems with the concept, and in his 2012 edited collection, the term
“gendercide” is mentioned only once, by a contributor (Drummond, 2012: 106).
6
For later progress of the ICTR in prosecuting rape, see Bianchi 2013.
7
However, the Rome Statute defines rape as penetration by force, threat of force, or coercion,
turning its back on the Akayesu court’s more enlightened definition, which does not require
penetration or even physical contact.
8
Also see Jones 2002: 87: “’gendering’ genocide can provide powerful insights into the
outbreak, evolution, and defining character of genocidal killing.”
9
Also see Carpenter 2002, who writes (p. 94) that “we must better conceptualise the
interrelationship between gender and age. Too much gender theory has treated males and females
as oppositional categories, assuming that gendered power has a static, unidirectional flow. . . . In
truth . . . , age categories (child, youth, adult, elder) intersect and even constitute gender
24
categories (woman, women-and-children, battle-age male, woman of child-bearing age). With
this in mind, sex-disparities in power become highly contingent.”